Weapons of Mass Instruction

“Bravery is not the opposite of fear." –Dan Garrity

Getting to know you: experiences, fears, ambitions and realities

Our first two questions

What does the Web do well? What are its advantages?

What does the Web not do so well? What does it do not so well?

How do we design to the Web's and our strengths and minimize or otherwise acknowledge the Web's and our weaknesses?

The approach we're going to take

Templates

Storyboarding

What is HTML?

What is Dreamweaver MX?

The big 4:

BC's Seven Sins of Web design

Add something because it looks cool. No, have an idea behind every pitch. Be intentional, purposeful, and deliberate.
Be wishy-washy, unconfident in your own aesthetic. No, once you've got an idea behind your pitch, be totally committed to that pitch. Sold out. Hard, high heat.
Treat navigation as an add-on. Navigation is not a feature of your Web site, it IS your Web site. Make it obvoius and self-evident. No training required.
Content is king. Build it and they will come. No, the audience is king. Serve your audience, and no one else.
Show off. Show what you can do. No, KISSS: Keep it simple, scan-able & scaleable. Less really is more.
Form before function. Prada shoes. No, form follows function. Birkenstocks. No clown pants.
"I'm a visual person." . . . "I'm a writer." . . . "I just do FILL IN THE BLANK." Maybe someday, but not today. Not this month. You are a communicator. You work with video, photo, audio, words, design. You are converged and merged, immersive and immediate, hypertextual, interactive ... kicking butt and taking names. This is the future, so let's embrace it.

Next time:

Some day, after this semester, in another class, another country, another life:

color, type, photoshop, illustrator, css, rss, javascript, actionscripting, flash, fireworks, animation, ftp, frames, databases and SQL, e-commerce, security, search engine marketing